Shel and I wake up simultaneously every morning, our eyes fluttering in synchrony. First thing, we share our dreams.
Shel dreams in vivid, wild chaos. Her dreams are strange, plotless affairs, incongruence stacked on incongruence.
My dreams, by contrast, are mild and carefully ordered. They are events with beginnings, middles, and ends.
Shel is very jealous of my dreams. And I am jealous of hers.
"A waterfall of spiders!" I laugh, slipping out of my pajamas. "That's amazing!"
Shel shakes her head. "Folding chairs in a river. A blue milkshake. Anteaters with silly, cartoon eyes. It's all just weird rubbish. Yours are so much better."
I jump into a pair of worn jeans and my favorite dark green sweater. "But the tunnel didn't go anywhere. The whole thing was a waste of time. My brain's just not as creative as your brain."
"Creative" snorts Shel. "I'm just all addled is all. Comes from being born dead."
She can't help but smile a bit as she says it. It's her favorite joke.
Shel was dead when she came out of the womb. She had a hole in her heart. The doctors had seen it a long way ahead of delivery and they had a series of surgeries all planned for when she was big enough to manage them. But Shel's heart gave it up a lot sooner than anyone had thought and she came out blue and silent and still. One of the doctors even declared her dead, which is something our parents have gone out of their way to forget, even if it's Shel's favorite fact in the whole world.
When Shel gets a C on a math test, she likes to shrug and say, "Well, it's pretty good for a dead woman."
When there's one piece of pizza left, she likes to whimper and say, "It's fine. I'll just starve and die...again."
It shouldn't surprise anyone to find out that Shel's a bit spoiled. It's hard to hold it against her, though. I mean, she did die after all.
After breakfast we borrow mom's car and drive out to the "beach" on Spindle Drive. I put beach in quotation marks because's really more of an inlet piled up on both sides with big, square-shaped rocks and thick patches of gorse. It's fine enough for us, though. We like to sit on the rocks and read books. It smells like mud and seaweed, but it's quiet and the air is sharp and clean, so it works.
We pick our way to the usual spot, but before the books come out, Shel grabs my hand.
"Wen," she says. "Do you remember when we were born?"
"Of course!" I say. "Sesame Street was on the TV. Dad was wearing his lucky red polo. Mom had that perm she never likes to talk about..."
"Shut up," says Shel. She smiles, but it's not much of a smile. Something's clearly bothering her. "I mean...I don't know. Something about it doesn't seem right to me."
"The thing where you died?" I offer, poking her gently in the ribs.
"Well...yeah. I guess. It just feels like I should remember it, somehow."
"Nobody remembers anything from when they were a baby," I say. "Nothing. Most adults don't have memories of anything earlier than like 3 years old, I think I heard once."
"It's just..." She takes a deep breath. "It doesn't make sense, I guess. The way mom tells it..."
"Mom sucks at telling stories."
"I mean, doctors don't just declare you dead for no reason, right? If my heart stopped and I wasn't getting oxygen for...for how long? Ten minutes? Longer?"
"No," I say, though truthfully I have no idea. I was still inside my mother at that point. "No more than that, I don't think."
"Why don't I have brain damage?" says Shel. "Or do I have brain damage? Like, do I?"
I laugh, not to be cruel, but because it's ridiculous. "You do not have brain damage."
"You're so much smarter than me," says Shel. Her eyes are starting to water. "And it's not just my dreams. My thoughts are kinda jumbled sometimes. Sometimes it's really hard for me to...to process things correctly. You know how if you're running too many programs on your computer it gets all slow and stuff? That's me a lot of the time. Like, I just can't keep up with everything and I think...I think I got brain damage when I was..."
I grab Shel and pull her into my arms. "Shut up, shut up, shut up, you silly girl. You're fine. That's all normal. I feel the same way sometimes."
"Really?"
"Really."
Up above, the sky had taken advantage of the momentary distraction to change from blue to cast iron gray.
"Tut tut," I say. "Looks like rain."
"Let's go to a movie," says Shel. It's summer and I don't feel like being productive, so of course I agree.
We pull off Spindle, and head down Milwood Lane. It begins to rain. Shel fiddles with the radio while I drive. At the top of a hill, we run head-first into a Oldsmobile driving in the wrong lane. Everything is lightning and thunder and smoke and noise and then blackness.
I wake up in a hospital room. Mom and Dad aren't there, but a nurse is. She seems surprised to see me awake. She leaves the room in a hurry. Finally a doctor arrives, followed closely by my mother.
"Where's Shel?" I slur. "Is she okay?"
My mother's eyes are red. The doctor is a young man. He seems nervous.
"Your sister is...not doing well," says the doctor, glancing sideways at my mother. "Extensive...extensive injuries, most concerning is the damage to her heart. We..."
The doctor steps away from my bed and pulls my mother into a whispered conversation. He points at me. My mother is crying and nodding. There's a new nurse in the room. I hadn't noticed him enter.
The doctor comes back to the bed. As he collects himself, I notice the nurse has slipped straps through the metal bars of my bed and around my wrists. I'm too bewildered to say anything about this.
The doctor is talking. "Under Article 43.11J of the Wysene Doctrine, Ethics and Protocols section, it is my duty to inform you that your processing unit will be placed in system freeze, effective immediately, so that your bodily organs may be harvested for the care and wellbeing of one Shelly Anne Collette. During this period of freeze, your active consciousness may be placed in a central data server until such a time as a replacement body is purchased." The doctor nods, mostly to himself. "It won't hurt," he mumbles, before shuffling out of the room.
"What?" I have no idea what any of that means. The nurse is finished binding my arms and legs. He looks at my mother. "Mom?" I try to shout, but my voice is hoarse. "What's happening? Where's Shel?"
My mom finally comes to me. She is sad, but only as she leans over my bed do I realize that she is not sad for me.
"I hoped it would never come to this," she says, her eyes avoiding my own. "Shelly was our last shot. I never told either of you that, but it's true. Years of trying. Thousands and thousands of dollars. Shelly was the last shot. It made us...well, it made us a little crazy, maybe. And when they told us about the hole in her heart...well. You were commissioned as a worst case scenario. We never meant to turn you on, but then Shelly came out all blue and it seemed like the worst case came true. But it didn't." Her eyes well over with tears and I know they are happy tears. Proud tears.
"She came through. She came back. She's a miracle, you know that, right? A real miracle. And you..." She swallows, her eyes running up and down my trapped body. "A sister. Two is better than one. And you grew up to be so different. That's really...it's very interesting when you think about it. You were a perfect replication. Your AI's central algorithm was coded 100 percent to her brainwaves. But you became two different people...two different things..."
She shakes her head. "I never thought of you as a spare. Neither did your father. And certainly not Shelly. She'll hate us for this. I know she will. There's nothing she loves more than you. But you understand, don't you? It's for her. It was always for her. And after all this...we can't stop now, can we? We can't let her go now - not after all we've done."
She grips my hand and squeezes. "Thank you, Wendy. You were so much more than I ever expected."
Then she leaves. She does not look back. My father never comes. The nurse grabs the end of my bed. "It'll be over soon," he sighs, as he kicks away the lock on the wheels.
I feel the jerk as the bed begins to move.
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